Originally Posted by Tralen:Pre-linearizing all textures is only a solution if you're responsible for producing the textures, but when you're working with dedicated texture artists it's hard to have them work in linear space.

Artists painting textures should not paint in linear space. That defeats the purpose of working in perceptual space. The outline on the blog and above is that you work in perceptual space but render in linear.

Your texture artists should publish their textures that includes linearizing a final version. Their working version should remain sRGB. If they don't want to publish textures in a pipeline then. . .find new texture artists? That's the point of a cohesive pipeline is that everyone isn't doing their own thing.

We prefer artists not rely mainly on the shader ball swatch. In-render it's often very different. We do use the gamma nodes but only for the color picker since there's no adequate solution in Maya.

I would:

Paint in perceptual
Linearize in Nuke
Render to 16-half EXR (not 32 unless it's a data pass like z-depth or world position)
Gamma correct color swatch (note that pur Red, Green, whatever is not affected by a gamma curve, it leaves end points of the curve untouched. Only shades/tints)
View in the correct space in the Maya render view.

Originally Posted by Starbutt:
It seems that this way does not require gamma correction of material's swatches. I believe this old method is better then new "Enable Color Management"! Please, correct me if I am wrong!

Color swatches will be considered linear, so you will have no accurate representation of their color, except from rendering.

Originally Posted by Bitter:Artists painting textures should not paint in linear space. That defeats the purpose of working in perceptual space. The outline on the blog and above is that you work in perceptual space but render in linear.

I understand that and I see your point, but I believe this is an ideal scenario that does not correlate with the control people actually have. Unless you have power over what other people do (you're running your own studio or are in a major position), you're bound to deal with inconsistencies. In this circumstances, by working with Maya, you will have to correct everything either by checking every texture in Nuke/PS or by applying gamma nodes.

Not everyone can replace texture artists on a whim, and most of the time is easier to have them replace you. But I agree that pre-linearizing is the best option for a project where I do have the control, and I apreciate the link you posted, I will try to implement that workflow in my own projects.

Change isn't immediate but I think with some time and examples you can probably influence other artists to do things more efficiently.

In a pipeline with a decent developer or script writer, the linearization and publishing process can be automated easily (We show part of this on the blog about texture publishing with other attributes: Texture Publishing to mental ray ). And if your texture artist forgets you can hit the button yourself and chastize them later.

Originally Posted by Bitter:Artists painting textures should not paint in linear space. That defeats the purpose of working in perceptual space. The outline on the blog and above is that you work in perceptual space but render in linear.

Your texture artists should publish their textures that includes linearizing a final version. Their working version should remain sRGB. If they don't want to publish textures in a pipeline then. . .find new texture artists? That's the point of a cohesive pipeline is that everyone isn't doing their own thing.

We prefer artists not rely mainly on the shader ball swatch. In-render it's often very different. We do use the gamma nodes but only for the color picker since there's no adequate solution in Maya.

I would:

Paint in perceptual
Linearize in Nuke
Render to 16-half EXR (not 32 unless it's a data pass like z-depth or world position)
Gamma correct color swatch (note that pur Red, Green, whatever is not affected by a gamma curve, it leaves end points of the curve untouched. Only shades/tints)
View in the correct space in the Maya render view.

Hi,

Just a question.

If i save my file texture in photoshop in 32bit in Exr format then does it need gamma correction node or Enable color management setting on in maya ?
I don't have nuke.
can u elaborate this step by step.

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